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It has been known for some time that consumers' identities influence purchasing decisions and people form strong identity connections, or "links," with products and brands. However, research has yet to determine whether identity-linked products are differentially treated at disposal in comparison to products that are not identity linked. Across seven studies, the current research shows that when an everyday product (e.g., paper, cups, aluminum cans) is linked to a consumer's identity, it is less likely to be trashed and more likely to be recycled. Further, the tendency to recycle an identity-linked product increases with the strength and positivity of the connection between the consumer and product (or brand). Finally, the disposal behavior can be explained by consumers' motivation to avoid trashing a product that is linked to the self because it is viewed as an identity threat. In sum, consumers will be more likely to recycle (rather than trash) a product if the product is linked to a consumer's identity. This occurs because placing an identitylinked product in the trash is symbolically similar to trashing a part of the self, a situation consumers are motivated to avoid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper updates and replicates an earlier study comparing purchases by working wives (employed outside the home) and nonworking wives and the amounts spent for time-saving durables, other durables, and hobby and recreation items. Using a 1977 data base similar to one gathered a decade earlier, wife's labor force behavior was again found not to be significantly related to either purchase or expenditure decisions for time-saving durables, when income, stage of life cycle, and other situational variables were held constant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, there have been relatively few attempts to integrate the cultural dimension into knowledge of consumer behavior. This paper focuses on the cross-cultural dimension of family purchasing roles. We discuss a theory developed by Rodman (1972) that attempts to place the findings of marital power studies in cultural context; introduce an analytical technique called correspondence analysis that can be used to analyze family decision-making data collected across cultures; and present the results of a five-nation family decision-making study to illustrate how Rodman's theory and correspondence analysis can be employed in cross-cultural research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information search is a critical component of the purchase decision process for most consumer durables. This paper postulates a descriptive model of information search and tests the hypothesized relationships using survey data obtained from a probability sample of new automobile purchasers. The results support the hypothesis that there are at least two unique components of prior knowledge: specific product knowledge and general product-class knowledge. The former causes less external search, the latter causes more external search. Cost of search was found to be negatively related to external search, while external search was found to be positively related to cost savings. Satisfaction was found to be related to cost savings but not to external search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer behavior and well-being tend to be intertwined concepts in economics, whereas well-being (including poverty and wealth) has not been of prime interest to consumer behaviorists. Economic concepts of well-being in relation to consumer behavior are clarified and classified in this paper. The main objective of the present study is to further the contemporary effort of establishing a closer link between the behaviorist's and the economist's views of consumer behavior by highlighting the well-being implications inherent in the link. To do so, the bulk of the exposition will be devoted to a digest of the relevant concepts and measures in economics. Such a digest is needed because the indicated inseparability of well-being and behavior in economics is only a one-way relationship; there is no concept of behavior that is separable from well-being,[1] but there are a number of diversified well-being concepts that stand alone and are not necessarily compatible with each other. This gives rise to a lack of clarity concerning the interpretation of well-being in economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the questionnaire content of the 1980 Census of Population, and provides a brief rationale for changes that have been made since the 1970 Census. In addition, coverage improvement plans that are new to the census operation are delineated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An underlying assumption of much of the literature treating business is that "good behavior" on the part of a firm will be rewarded by consumers. This paper reports on an empirical test of the reverse of this assumption, namely, the effects of questionable corporate conduct on consumer behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives consumers to invest repeated efforts to acquire rewards? This research shows that the temporal arrangement of effort investment and reward dispensation can affect people's motivation to earn more rewards. Two procedures for acquiring rewards are examined: a piecemeal procedure, whereby rewards are acquired gradually through repeated small efforts, and a lump-sum procedure, whereby a number of rewards are acquired all at once after a longer period of work. Holding constant the total quantity of acquired rewards and the effort- reward exchange rate, the piecemeal procedure is more motivating than the lumpsum procedure (experiment 1) because the former results in a greater sense of achievement (experiment 2). If the sense of achievement is curtailed by preventing people from accumulating the rewards they have earned (experiment 3), by providing rewards that are different from the already-earned rewards (experiment 4), or by breaking the association between effort and rewards (experiment 5), the piecemeal procedure is no more motivating than the lump-sum procedure. The effect is also diminished when consumers are satiated with the rewards (experiment 6). Taken together, these experiments provide converging evidence that acquiring rewards piece by piece motivates people to continue earning them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Results indicate that transitory, relative to permanent, income affects the timing but not the magnitude of automobile expenditure. Five permanent income estimators are used, including expected income reported by the households. Predictions using this particular measure indicate instances of significant improvement, suggesting that direct measurement of anticipated income may help predict automobile expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on laws and legislation related to automobile repairs. The author discusses the financial investment that comes with owning an automobile, specifically the annual cost of repairs. He notes that to help consumers avoid being subject to unnecessary costs some U.S. states have begun to require certification or licensing among mechanics or offer some type of consumer awareness course to help educate car owners. The author suggests that there is a research void that needs to be filled to examine the effectiveness of these licensing programs and consumer education courses in order to direct legislation on how to regulate the automobile repair industry.

Though perceived financial well-being is viewed as an important topic of consumer research, the literature contains no accepted definition of this construct. Further, there has been little systematic examination of how perceived financial well-being may affect overall well-being. Using consumer financial narratives, several largescale surveys, and two experiments, we conceptualize perceived financial wellbeing as two related but separate constructs: 1) stress related to the management of money today (current money management stress), and 2) a sense of security in one's financial future (expected future financial security). We develop and validate measures of these constructs (web appendix A) and then demonstrate their relationship to overall well-being, controlling for other life domains and objective measures of the financial domain. Our findings demonstrate that perceived financial well-being is a key predictor of overall well-being and comparable in magnitude to the combined effect of other life domains (job satisfaction, physical health assessment, and relationship support satisfaction). Further, the relative importance of current money management stress to overall well-being varies by income groups and due to the differing antecedents of current money management stress and expected future financial security. Implications for financial well-being and education efforts are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consumer Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize consumer experience. Because consumers can actively interact with smart objects, the traditional, human-centric conceptualization of consumer experience as consumers' internal subjective responses to branded objects may not be sufficient to conceptualize consumer experience in the IoT. Smart objects possess their own unique capacities and their own kinds of experiences in interaction with the consumer and each other. A conceptual framework based on assemblage theory and object- oriented ontology details how consumer experience and object experience emerge in the IoT. This conceptualization is anchored in the context of consumer-object assemblages, and defines consumer experience by its emergent properties, capacities, and agentic and communal roles expressed in interaction. Four specific consumer experience assemblages emerge: enabling experiences, comprising agentic self-extension and communal self-expansion, and constraining experiences, comprising agentic self-restriction and communal self-reduction. A parallel conceptualization of the construct of object experience argues that it can be accessed by consumers through object-oriented anthropomorphism, a nonhuman-centric approach to evaluating the expressive roles objects play in interaction. Directions for future research are derived, and consumer researchers are invited to join a dialogue about the important themes underlying our framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research documents "the friendly taking effect" in choosing consumption packages for the self and others, interpersonal closeness leads to a preference for a self-benefiting package when this package also offers greater total benefit to the self-other collective (studies 1 and 2). We propose that a friendly intention (i.e., concern for the total benefit) underlies the friendly taking effect; therefore, people both take more from and give more to a close (vs. distant) other when doing so offers greater benefits in total (study 3), and people are cognitively tuned in to (e.g., acquire, remember) information about the total benefit more when choosing a package for themselves and a close (vs. distant) other (study 4). Moreover, the importance people place on the total benefit mediates the impact of closeness on people's preference for self-benefiting packages (study 5). We explore boundary conditions (study 6) and implications for marketers of consumption packages (study 7). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although heterogeneity in consumption communities is pervasive, there is little understanding of its impact on communities. This study shows how heterogeneous communities operate and interact with the marketplace. Specifically, the authors draw on actor-network theory, conceptualizing community as a network of heterogeneous actors (i.e., individuals, institutions, and resources), and examine the interplay of these actors in a mainstream activity-based consumption community -the distance running community. Findings, derived from a multimethod investigation, show that communities can preserve continuity even when heterogeneity operates as a destabilizing force. Continuity preserves when community members depend on each other for social and economic resources: a dependency that promotes the use of frame alignment practices. These practices enable the community to (re)stabilize, reproduce, and reform over time. The authors also highlight the overlapping roles of consumers and producers and develop a dimensional characterization of communities that helps bridge prior research on brand communities, consumption subcultures, and consumer tribes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research undertakes a carefully designed and detailed empirical study to gain insights into (1) the extent of price differentials between wealthy and poor neighborhoods; (2) what induces such differentials, especially the nature and intensity of competitive environments, including mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart; and (3) their relative impacts. It finds a price differential of about 10%--15% for everyday items. Even after controlling for store size and competition, prices are found to be 2%--5% higher in poor areas. It also finds that it is not the poverty level per se but access to cars that acts as a key determinant of consumers' price search patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigated impulse buying as resulting from the depletion of a common--but limited--resource that governs self-control. In three investigations, participants' self-regulatory resources were depleted or not; later, impulsive spending responses were measured. Participants whose resources were depleted, relative to participants whose resources were not depleted, felt stronger urges to buy, were willing to spend more, and actually did spend more money in unanticipated buying situations. Participants having depleted resources reported being influenced equally by affective and cognitive factors and purchased products that were high on each factor at equal rates. Hence, self-regulatory resource availability predicts whether people can resist impulse buying temptations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has examined consumers' use of self-control to avoid hedonic (myopic) temptations, such as overspending and smoking. In this research we investigate the opposite form of self-control, whereby consumers force themselves to indulge and avoid default forms of spending on utilitarian necessities and/or savings. In particular, consumers who have difficulty choosing items that are perceived as indulgences or luxuries (e.g., a cruise) over necessities (e.g., saving for college education) and cash in everyday decisions may use precommitments to indulgence, especially when the psychological cost of such commitments is less concrete. These propositions were tested in a series of studies involving real and hypothetical choices as well as process measures. The results indicate that a substantial segment of consumers choose hedonic luxury rewards over cash of equal or greater value; consumers typically explain such choices based on the need to precommit to indulgence, to make sure that the award does not end up in the pool of money used for necessities. In addition, consistent with our analysis, the likelihood of precommitting to indulgence is enhanced when (a) the consequences of the decision will be realized farther in the future, (b) the odds of winning the reward are lower, and (c) consumers anticipate how they will use each possible award. We also show that awards representing indulgence are more effective than cash as incentives for participation in a (real) lottery. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how ads with different combinations of source and nonsource cues activate culture-bound cognitions among members of a dominant culture and members of a subculture within that dominant culture. As participants in both the dominant culture and their own subculture, members of subcultures are posited to possess knowledge of both groups. As such, their reactions to mainstream advertising are expected to be similar to those of members of the dominant culture. However, because members of the dominant culture are not as familiar with the subculture, their reactions to cues contained in subculture-targeted ads will differ from those of members of the subculture. Results of an experiment show that dominant culture source cues activate highly internalized dominant cultural models for all participants, leading to self-referencing and favorable ad attitudes. However, subculture source and nonsource cues interact to activate subcultural knowledge, induce self-referencing, and enhance ad attitudes only among members of the subculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies were conducted among professional security analysts to explore their patterns of decision making while managing investment portfolios. In study 1, a computer-based simulation, the analysts' styles differed markedly, with most exhibiting either a momentum or contrarian approach, as indicated by responses to portfolio stock price changes. Study 2 used a verbal protocol procedure and semi-structured depth interviews to probe the analysts' thought processes. Momentum and contrarian investors were found to differ on a number of dimensions including price expectations, age, experience, raw performance, risk propensity, cognitive style, knowledge calibration, and strategy adaptivity. Implications and limitations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of evaluative inconsistencies in product attribute information on the strength of the resultant attitude, as manifested in its predictive ability. The existing literature makes opposing predictions regarding the effects of information inconsistency on attitude strength. We seek to resolve this dilemma by investigating the likelihood of inconsistency reconciliation—that is, whether or not people elaborate on inconsistencies with the goal of achieving an integrated evaluation. A strengthening effect should result when the processing goal is conducive to reconciliation and goal-facilitating factors are present in the environment; however, a weakening effect should be obtained when conditions are unfavorable to inconsistency reconciliation. Results from three experiments provide support for this conceptualization and offer a possible resolution of the opposing theoretical perspectives present in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The context in which a product is seen influences the internal standard that consumers use to judge both this and other products. Two experiments showed that a product was judged as less expensive in a high-priced context than in a low-priced context even though the product's actual price was recalled as higher in the first condition than in the second. This effect of the initial context carried over to a new product encountered 48 hours later and also influenced price estimates of products from other categories. Additional experiments demonstrated that the standard that people use to evaluate products can be influenced by exposure to high and low stimulus values that are below participants' perceptual thresholds. Thus, the effects of internal standards on product judgments can occur without an awareness of the conditions that led to the construction of this standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-control is a promising concept for consumer research, and self-control failure may be an important cause of impulsive purchasing. Three causes of self-control failure are described. First, conflicting goals and standards undermine control, such as when the goal of feeling better immediately conflicts with the goal of saving money. Second, failure to keep track of (monitor) one's own behavior renders control difficult. Third, self-control depends on a resource that operates like strength or energy, and depletion of this resource makes self-control less effective. Trait differences in self-control predict many behaviors. Implications for theory and research in consumer behavior are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reference price effects on consumer price perceptions are often explained by Helson's adaptation-level theory, in which the cognitive representation of reference price is the prototype of the relevant category. However, recent conceptualizations and empirical evidence suggest the possibility of an exemplar model, which may be specified using Volkmann's range theory or Parducci's range-frequency theory. In two experiments, these three contextual models of reference price effects are pitted against one another. Based on the MANOVA and model fitting, range-frequency theory accounted for reference price effects that the other theories could not, suggesting that consumers compare the target price against specific members of the category rather than the category prototype. A third experiment demonstrated that range and frequency effects are moderated by the stimulus presentation condition, suggesting that consumers place greater weight on extreme prices anchoring the range for internal reference prices than for external reference prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past expenses have been shown to influence future spending behavior by depleting available budgets. However, a prerequisite for this relationship is the accurate recall of past payments and the experiencing of the full aversive impact associated with them. This article shows that the use of different payment mechanisms influences both these factors and hence moderates the effects of past payments on future spending. Specifically, past payments strongly reduce purchase intention when the payment mechanism requires the consumer to write down the amount paid (rehearsal) and when the consumer's wealth is depleted immediately rather than with a delay (immediacy). Two experiments show support for the proposed theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a consumer-focused approach for the study of consumer behavior. I argue that much of the existing literature, by developing knowledge that focuses on the determinants of consumer purchasing, is implicitly biased toward a marketing perspective of consumer behavior. In contrast, I propose the need for a consumer-focused approach that would advance knowledge aimed at helping consumers make wiser purchases. This approach should address the most important and challenging consumer decisions, describe consumer behavior in a manner that leads to prescriptions, consider the actions of other parties in the marketplace, and identify biases unique to or exacerbated by the consumer context. This article then illustrates what such a consumer-focused approach would imply for consumer research in three areas: negotiations, financial services, and auctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research proposes that negotiators consider each other's payoffs in their evaluation of potential settlements beyond the level necessary to maintain the bargaining relationship. We further hypothesize that the way in which negotiators weight their opponents' payoffs, relative to their own, is a function of characteristics of the relationship and of the bargainers' personalities. Specifically, we consider liking of the other party, payoff expectations, satisfaction with past settlements, the likelihood of future negotiations, egocentricity, and power orientation. We demonstrate the impact of these factors on the satisfaction negotiators derive from profiting more and less than their opponents using data from an experiment in which subjects negotiate with computer-simulated opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It appears that buyers sometimes knowingly pay a price that is higher than that justified by the relative quality of the product. Such a price premium is argued to be an economically rational attempt by quality-conscious buyers to ensure that the seller does not provide a lower than promised level of quality for experience products. Conversely, for search products, price premiums are argued to be the consequence of lack of search by buyers who are less quality conscious. Results from a survey conducted in an organizational buying setting indicate that buyers' tendency to pay a price premium for experience products increases with an increase in their quality consciousness, while for search products this tendency decreases with an increase in their quality consciousness. The implications of this finding are discussed; further analysis leads to additional speculation regarding some other mechanisms that buyers may use to assure product quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a literature review that explains the antecedents and values of visual research. Then it illustrates the use of photographs and audio recordings of informants to enrich interviews. The term "autodriving" indicates that the interview is "driven" by informants who are seeing and hearing their own behavior. Autodriving addresses the obtrusiveness and reactivity inherent in consumer-behavior research by explicitly encouraging consumers to comment on their consumption behavior as the photographs and recordings represent it. Thus, the research aims for a negotiated interpretation of consumption events. The results suggest that photographs offer exciting challenges to informants by encouraging their need to explain themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among numerous possible reference prices, expected future price is important. A consumer's expectation of the future price of a brand plays a crucial role in the decision to buy now or later. Failure to characterize reference price as a forward-looking concept, a common practice in the reference pricing literature, violates premises of neoclassical economic theory and leads to questionable modeling applications. Explicit measures of future price expectations were obtained and used to test various models of expectations formation, providing insight into the effect of expected future price on consumers' responses to price promotions and brand choice decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of situational ethnicity in consumption behavior is examined, and the relationship between ethnicity and consumption is argued to be affected by the situational contexts in which choices are made. Situational effects are proposed to operate through changes in the level of felt ethnicity and in the relationship between felt ethnicity and behavior. An empirical study demonstrates these effects by showing the impact of two situational dimensions--social surroundings and antecedent conditions--on ethnic food choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heritage Village, home of the PTL ministry, is the focus for a study of consumer behavior involving an explicit synthesis of worship and shopping. The present investigation seeks to better understand the way these pursuits, seemingly philosophically opposed, are brought together for joint consumption. Notions of pilgrimage and sacralization of the secular are useful constructs in examining this merger of religion and consumption, but a priori formulations must be modified to more fully explain the behavior of consumers at Heritage Village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of advertising repetition on several non-evaluative dimensions of attitudes and the strength of the relationship between attitudes and behavior are examined. The results indicate that attitudes formed on the basis of repeated ad exposure are similar to those formed on the basis of direct experience in that they are more accessible from memory, held with more confidence, and are more predictive of subsequent behavior than are attitudes based on a single ad exposure. The results are consistent with the proposition that attitude accessibility and attitude confidence moderate the attitude-behavior relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on previous research, this article proposes that choice behavior under preference uncertainty may be easier to explain by assuming that consumers select the alternative supported by the best reasons. This approach provides an explanation for the so-called attraction effect and leads to the prediction of a compromise effect. Consistent with the hypotheses, the results indicate that (1) brands tend to gain share when they become compromise alternatives in a choice set; (2) attraction and compromise effects tend to be stronger among subjects who expect to justify their decisions to others; and (3) selections of dominating and compromise brands are associated with more elaborate and difficult decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mandler theorized that the level of congruity between a product and a more general product category schema may influence the nature of information processing and thus product evaluations. Products that are moderately incongruent with their associated category schemas are expected to stimulate processing that leads to a more favorable evaluation relative to products that are either congruent or extremely incongruent. Data from three experiments conducted in new product contexts are consistent with Mandler's hypothesis and serve as a basis for theorizing about the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two processes at work in contemporary society are the secularization of religion and the sacralization of the secular. Consumer behavior shapes and reflects these processes. For many, consumption has become a vehicle for experiencing the sacred. This article explores the ritual substratum of consumption and describes properties and manifestations of the sacred inherent in consumer behavior. Similarly, the processes by which consumers sacralize and desacralize dimensions of their experience are described. The naturalistic inquiry approach driving the insights in this article is advanced as a corrective to a premature narrowing of focus in consumer research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In daily living, people participate regularly in a variety of ritualized activities at home, work, and play, both as individuals and as members of some larger community. The average person also relies on various ritual events to mark such significant life passages as graduation, marriage, and death. Despite these pervasive and meaningful ritual experiences, consumer research has largely failed to recognize this extensive behavioral domain. The present article introduces and elaborates the ritual construct as a vehicle for interpreting consumer behavior and presents the results of two exploratory studies that investigate the artifactual and psychosocial contents of young adults' personal grooming rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional family life cycle, revised family life cycle, and family composition variables are compared in models predicting total family clothing expenditures. There is little difference in the predictive ability of the three sets of variables. In models controlling for socioeconomic and demographic variables, family life cycle and family composition variables have little predictive ability, independent of income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of children's abilities to recognize consumption symbolism has been examined using adults' products, but not using children's products. The present study examines children's perceptions of the users of children's products and tests hypotheses concerning the effects of age, sex, social class, and sibling influence. As expected, the greatest differences are found among children of different ages. Results are interpreted as due to product-related experience and positive biases toward higher-status brand names and personally owned products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports empirical investigations of the measurement assumptions implicit in the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS). The ICS has been used in much of the past research that attempts to incorporate concepts of consumer psychology within frameworks of economic theory. The research employs a new numerical analysis model, known as alternating least-squares optimal scaling, to generate insights into this historically important indicator of consumer economic attitudes. The results of the present analysis, based on two national consumer surveys. raise new concerns about the procedures commonly used for the measurement and reporting of consumer sentiment. The procedures used provide insight concerning construction of composite variables from a set of categorical (or mixed-metric) questionnaire items, as well as a way of analyzing "don't know" responses to questionnaire items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social class is conceptually complicated, philosophically upsetting, and methodologically challenging, yet it continues to offer provocative insights into consumption choices. The latest thinking from sociologists points to a basic continuity in the American status structure: fundamental differences among the classes in self-image, social horizons, and consumption goals continue despite changes in income distribution, the demographics of family composition, and life styles. The question of whether class or income is the better predictor of marketplace behavior should be rephrased: How does class affect use of income? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural assimilation of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest is assessed by comparing their food consumption patterns with those of income-matched Anglos living in the same region and those of income-matched Mexicans living in Mexico City. Rather than relying on self-report data as indicators of consumption patterns, data concerning the contents of the garbage of these three types of households are used. The results suggest that, contrary to predictions based on the traditional model of assimilation. Mexican-American consumption patterns are not a simple blending of Mexican and Anglo patterns. Rather, Mexican-American consumption patterns suggest the emergence of a unique cultural style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many consumers appear to rationally calculate the net worth of a household investment, but a substantial minority may lack the skills or alertness to perceive an investment opportunity and initiate analysis. Intentions to engage in complementary activities play an important role in the investment decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study brings together the fields of industrial organization and consumer research in an attempt to account for variations in consumer dissatisfaction among product categories. A major portion of these variations is empirically accounted for by distributional and cost/size factors. The theoretical explanations behind the empirical associations are discussed in the context of the correspondence between economic theory and consumer data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic literature contains several sometimes contradictory hypotheses concerning the relationships among quality, price, and advertising. We investigate the impact of published quality ratings on these relationships and find that quality and advertising are much more likely to be positively related in the presence of quality ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regressions using panel data on grocery purchases show lower purchase costs are significantly associated with a larger number of stores visited per week. There is also evidence, but somewhat weaker, of diminishing gains from such search. An economic model of the determinants of search suggests that prices paid, quantities purchased, and number of store visits are interrelated, a view supported by results of estimating a proposed simultaneous-equations model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fishbein and Ajzen have proposed a theory in which behavioral intention formation is a function of the separable effects of attitude and the social norm. A variable network is deduced from their writings that explicitly models complex variable interdependencies not previously subjected to empirical testing. The findings from an experimental test support a model in which normative variables mediate the effects of both cognitive and normative information on behavioral intentions. Implications for the theory's central equations and for information processing in general are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of barriers deter consumers from making energy conserving choices when buying major durables. In a field experiment, refrigerator energy labels and sales staff emphasis were manipulated in an attempt to help put these barriers into perspective. Energy information was most effective in the low price market segment when consumers were choosing between manual and frost-free refrigerators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous attempts to estimate values of travel-time savings from behavioral and nonbehavioral models are reviewed and analyzed. Various methods are compared and evaluated with respect to their usefulness in obtaining accurate estimates. Future research emphasizing derivation of individual values is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conjoint analysis is used to determine the impact of factors such as renown of performers, seating priority, season discount, and driving time on the demand for subscription series to performing arts events. Checks to assess the consistency of the data are developed and implemented. The results suggest that commonly computed derived-attribute importance weights need to be adjusted by the number of levels, if rank order preference data are collected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although derived from the USDA economy food plan, the Federal poverty thresholds have no real basis in a criterion of nutritional adequacy, but are a relative measure of poverty, suggesting that biological minima cannot be used to define poverty in a developed country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]